Lifeboat Foundation

For the Gallery of Fluid Motion, researchers take the director’s chair and create videos on 3D printer patterns, frost formation, and paint swirls.

The APS Division of Fluid Dynamics has announced the 2023 winners of its annual Gallery of Fluid Motion video and poster contest. The videos below received the Milton van Dyke Award, which recognizes both videos and posters. A new traveling exhibit of past winners is currently on display at the National Academy of Sciences.

A first-principles model accounts for the wide range of critical temperatures (T_c’s) for four materials and suggests a parameter that determines T_c in any high-temperature superconductor.

Since the first high-temperature superconducting materials, known as the cuprates, were discovered in 1986, researchers have struggled to explain their properties and to find materials with even higher superconducting transition temperatures (T_c’s). One puzzle has been the cuprates’ wide variation in T_c, ranging from below 10 K to above 130 K. Now Masatoshi Imada of Waseda University in Japan and his colleagues have used first-principles calculations to determine the order parameters—which measure the density of superconducting electrons—for four cuprate materials and have predicted the T_c’s based on those order parameters [1]. The researchers have also found what they believe is the fundamental parameter that determines T_c in a given material, which they hope will lead to the development of higher-temperature superconductors.

For each material, Imada and his colleagues applied the basic principles of quantum mechanics, focusing on the planes of copper and oxygen atoms that are known to host the superconducting electrons. They used a combination of numerical techniques, including one supplemented by machine learning, and did not require any adjustable parameters.

A measurement of the charge radius of an aluminum nucleus probes the assumption that there are only three families of quarks.

In the standard model of particle physics, matter is made of elementary particles called quarks and leptons. Quarks are the heavy constituents that form, for example, protons and neutrons, whereas leptons are the light constituents, such as the electron. The six known quarks—up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom—are split into three families. But could there be a fourth family? Answering that question would require hundreds of different measurements in particle and nuclear physics. However, not all these measurements are yet available or precise enough, and many parameter values are only inferred or extrapolated. Now Peter Plattner at CERN in Switzerland and his colleagues show how a single one of these measurements can shift our understanding of this fundamental question [1].

In the quantum-mechanical framework of the standard model, quarks can oscillate among their different flavors. The best-known example occurs in the beta decay of radioactive nuclei: a proton is transformed into a neutron (or vice versa) when one of its quarks oscillates from up to down (or down to up). The rate of beta decay depends on many factors involving both nuclear and atomic physics, but the rate at which the quarks oscillate is described by a single quantity: V_ud, the so-called matrix element of the transformation of an up quark into a down quark.

A dynamical tension model captures how cells swap places with their neighbors in epithelial tissues, explaining observed phase transitions and cellular architectures.

Epithelial tissues line the surfaces of every organ in our bodies. In the earliest stages of organ development and in wound healing, the cells that make up these simple sheets constantly rearrange themselves, exchanging positions like molecules in a liquid. But this fluidization is often hindered by the formation of multicell clusters, whose origins remain unclear. Using a dynamical structural model, Fernanda Pérez-Verdugo and Shiladitya Banerjee of Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania now identify the mechanical prerequisites that lead to the formation and dissolution of these stabilized clusters [1]. They show how dynamic feedback between tension and strain controls the tissue’s material properties.

Existing models of tissue fluidity treat epithelial tissues as foam-like, polygonal networks of cells whose edges join at triple points. However, these models fail to explain the mechanisms underpinning cell neighbor exchanges. In particular, they oversimplify such exchanges by treating them as an instantaneous process, thereby avoiding the impact of exchanges that stall midprocess. One resulting discrepancy with experimental results is the absence of stable “rosette” structures that are observed in developing tissues where four or more cells meet.

Update from 02. December 2023:

LAION releases the 70 billion version of LeoLM trained with 65 billion tokens. It is based on Llama-2-70b, but according to LAION it can beat Meta’s base model — in both German and English.

“With this release, we hope to bring a new wave of opportunities to German open-source and commercial LLM research and accelerate adoption,” the team writes.

On July 21, 2017, a group of dignitaries, scientists and engineers gathered in Lead, South Dakota, to hold a unique groundbreaking ceremony—at a research institution in a former gold mine, about one mile underground. The ceremony marked the beginning of construction for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.

DUNE will study neutrinos, fundamental particles of matter that are abundant across the universe but difficult to catch. Over 100 trillion of them flow harmlessly and undetectably through your body each second.

Neutrinos come in three flavors—electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos—and they oscillate between those flavors as they travel. This means that a neutrino first produced as an electron neutrino can become a muon or tau neutrino.

A new study indicates that switching to a healthier diet at age 40 is associated with 8 added years of life.

NASA’s Dragonfly mission sounds like science fiction. But it’s real.

The space agency will launch the car-sized craft, fitted with eight spinning rotors, to one of the most intriguing worlds in our solar system, Saturn’s ocean-and dune-covered moon, Titan. It’s a frigid realm where methane, not water, fills lakes and seas, and where the dunes are teeming with the organic ingredients needed for life (as we know it) to develop.

NASA determined that Dragonfly aced its preliminary design stages, and on Nov. 28 gave the thumbs up for this “dual-quadcopter” endeavor to proceed to its final construction. The flying craft is uniquely designed for this mission, as it will explore hundreds of miles of Titan’s terrain. Over a planned mission of close to three years, Dragonfly will take off and land at multiple sites as it investigates the “prebiotic” conditions that could have provided the brew for life to eventually form in our solar system.

Elon Musk-led tunneling company The Boring Company has completed a new tunnel in Las Vegas as it continues to make progress on a larger loop covering much of the city’s downtown.

On Friday, The Boring Company page on X posted saying that the Prufrock-1 tunneling machine has completed the Westgate-2 tunnel, marking the massive tool’s fourth tunnel constructed in the city. In addition to Prufrock-1, the post also says that its the seventh tunnel the company has built in Las Vegas, while the other three were completed using Godot and its latest iteration of the Prufrock machine, the Prufrock-2.

The post also included a photo of Prufrock-1 emerging from the construction site beside the Westgate hotel, which you can see below.